e3 Mindset Tools

e3 ConsultantsGROUP developed the Entrepreneurial Mastermind Program (EMP) because we believe in supporting the creative actions of entrepreneurs. They are the life-blood of our society and add value to the lives of customers/clients, staff, partners, families, and their respective communities.

The exact same thing can be said of professional athletes. They create value in our communities through their actions both on and off the field. Their actions elicit pride in their fans and the cities they represent. Their legacies live in the minds of families as they passed down stories from generation to generation. Not to mention the charitable acts that professional athletes perform throughout their career and beyond. Whether or not an athlete desires the term “role model,” there is a need to manage the expectations that are placed upon them by society. All the while balancing the needs of the athlete’s family and business endeavors. Professional athletes ARE entrepreneurs!

Everyone has a finite amount of time. It is the scarcest resource and the one that entrepreneurs/professional athletes should protect the most. For this to occur, delegation is key. You must also surround yourself with like-minded people who not only value your time but also bring other resources to the table (their own time, talent, and/or capital) to achieve success in any of your endeavors.

The value of time as a resource is something a successful entrepreneur/athlete thinks about constantly. Every minute of every day is an opportunity to positively impact the life of a client/fan, staff member, or colleague/teammate. But in today’s world, protecting your time is also essential to achieving a simplified life. Just think about all the ways your time is “attacked” by the world around us. The Internet puts so much information at our fingertips, which can boost efficiency or be a danger. It’s easy to lose track of time surfing the web, tweeting to your fan base, clicking on interesting links, veering off your intended course of action. In addition, email allows us to accomplish much more in less time with nearly instant communication. Yet it can cause a lot of people to never stop working. When efficiency puts you out of balance in other areas of your life, you quickly lose sight of the big picture.

Furthermore, our cell phones are now portable offices and central nervous systems for time management. We can handle just about anything from cell phones should we dare to embrace the technology. All of these technological advancements were designed to make our lives better, right? But do they give us more free time to spend with our families, relax, and just enjoy life more? Usually not. Instead, the unbalanced person allows other influences to control his or her time. As an employee, you may be given more responsibility at work when you’re efficient and effective, but does your income increase? You may take care of a lot of tasks online quickly (pay bills, shop, even do your taxes), but you also lose something: customer service. There’s no human interaction anymore. People spend so much more time with their smartphones, iPads, and the latest and greatest tech toy that they forget how to communicate with each other.

A lack of communication (or unintended miscommunication) can actually waste much more time and frustrate all parties involved. Delivering information clearly and concisely is at the core of proper time management. Entrepreneurs and professional athletes who do this well accomplish more in less time. This causes other people to marvel at their productivity and results. Doing what you do best and delegating everything else to competent people is a practice that all people should master. You are essentially trading your capital for someone else’s talent in order to free up your time. And the more time you have to focus on your own talent, the more capital you can create.

Once you gravitate to this paradigm and commit to the process, the benefits to your life are amazing. Your time is precious. There is a finite amount of it, yet we never know how much. So why waste time doing things that you are not good at? Think of all the people you interact with every day who would benefit greatly if your time were optimized: more time to go to your kids’ games or school functions, a date night with your spouse every couple weeks instead of once in a while, time to tune up your golf game, or spend time catching up with your friends. This is what life is all about, not material possessions or accumulating money on your balance sheet but rather using your resources to enhance your life experiences.

Controlling your time involves saying yes to certain things that add value and no to everything else. Why? Because you will work too hard to create wealth over your lifetime. Don’t you want to insure the fruits of your labor are realized before it is too late?

Your talent is your habits, skills, and unique abilities. Understanding which talents you possess allows you to add value in all areas of your life and other people’s lives. Knowing your talent gives you the ability to create capital.

Wouldn’t your life be so much simpler if you could wake up every morning and focus on what you do best? When it comes to your job, career, or business enterprise, determining how you can add value in your daily routine is essential. When you work for someone else, the focus is normally on your quota, a sales goal, or impressing your manager so you can earn a bonus or a promotion. As a professional athlete, you are attempting to optimize your value to your team in order to obtain more financial security through a longer term contract, a higher per year salary, and additional incentives should you meet personal or team benchmarks.

Now those special employees who can take care of their customers while appeasing upper management seem to do very well in Corporate America. The same can be said for those professional athletes that are considered “franchise stars.” Their talents, either in Corporate America or major sports leagues, usually lead them to receive more responsibility, job security, and company perks—at least until their company’s business model changes, or the economy causes it to change its focus from customers to self-preservation. Or when a sports franchise decides to “go in a different direction” and focus on its bottom line more than putting a championship-caliber team on the field.

Operating your own business is a completely different animal altogether. A lot of people perceive self-employed people as more independent and driven to do things “their way,” with an ego represented by the title “President,” “CEO,” or “Founder” after their names. While in some cases this could be an accurate depiction, a true entrepreneur is someone who wants to educate others with a vision for adding value in some area of life that brings enjoyment to clients. Entrepreneurs have a gift for surrounding themselves with other talented people and causing their collective efforts to produce results they couldn’t as individuals. A professional athlete can operate as an entrepreneur both during and after their playing career has ended! Sometimes, the entrepreneurial path is a “transition period” for an athlete. Other times, it is about them “building their brand” and determining the best way to monetize their celebrity or impact on society.

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach would call this an entrepreneur’s “unique ability.” e3’s leadership team has studied Dan’s teachings for over fifteen years. His book, Focusing On Your Unique Ability, outlines how you can pinpoint unique abilities. Dan explains that your own unique ability is effortless because you love to do it. It happens naturally in your daily routine. People with unique abilities need to be committed to their futures through continual learning, improving, and growing so they can create new value in the world. Dan believes in a law of human existence: every human being has his or her own private experience of life. Unfortunately, the majority of us fail to manifest our uniqueness because we do not understand this principle: that your unique ability only emerges in the world through delegation. Uniqueness is a result of time and focus. For your uniqueness to emerge or become

external and powerful, you must delegate to superb support persons all activities except those that call for your unique ability. This process of delegation could take several years, but it is in your best interest to do it because you’ll need all the time available to focus on your unique ability.

Dan goes on to teach that studies of great performers in all fields support a general rule that it takes about ten thousand hours (roughly ten years) of repetition, experimentation, innovation, and formalization before a unique ability translates into genius-like activity. For most athletes, their genius appears at a time when teams are willing to sign them to a long term contract.

Protecting your personal and business economyshould be a top priority for any financial professional that have your best interests in mind. The science of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) teaches that the purpose of modeling talent is to reproduce excellence. Once you determine what your two or three unique abilities or talents are in the context of your playing career or business endeavors, then your next step is to surround yourself with capable people. The most successful entrepreneurs find people whose unique abilities complement their talents so that delegation can occur at a high level. When someone is comfortable delegating away everything but what he or she does best, all of a sudden he or she has more time to generate additional capital.

Talent is a special human trait that needs to be nurtured and supported. Constant education that enhances someone’s growth keeps talents progressing. Using your talents keeps you sharp and effective. Seeing results on and off of the field for an athlete causes their confidence to build at an accelerated pace. Without delegation and daily support, the focus on your unique abilities is negatively affected. Complexity and troubleshooting quickly sap the energy of even the savviest entrepreneur. For an athlete, a prolong slump or an injury can have the same impact of creating uncertainty about what the future holds for their career.

Life is changing at a rapid pace, so when it comes to a professional athlete’s finances, surrounding yourself with a team of professionals who have expertise in all areas of business operation is essential. If you have access to the best minds, you’re able to control your time and capital, while increasing your effectiveness at a much higher level.

With the proper use of your time and a focus on increasing the talents that add value to your career, an increase in capital should be the result. But acquiring capital doesn’t always occur in an ideal timeframe. If you need capital before you create it, what are your options?

Getting access to capital is difficult in today’s economic environment. You must either accumulate capital (which takes time) or borrow another person’s capital (like a family member) or a financial institution’s (a bank) capital and manage the opportunity costs (the terms of the loan). Once you accumulate enough capital, you have control over how you allocate that resource. This is an area where entrepreneurs set themselves apart from other people.

For a professional athlete, it all depends on the trajectory of their career. Was your family already blessed to have money while you were working hard as a young child to perfect your skills? Or, do you come from a household where money was not easy to come by and therefore, your athletic skills are a “ticket” out of your current circumstances (both for you and potential other family members)?

Were you a top draft pick and a recipient of a healthy signing bonus? OR, were you a later round draft pick (or not even drafted) and therefore, you faced the continued struggle of balancing your dream of playing professional sports with the responsibility of taking care of your family?

Who is looking out for your best interests while you are surrounded by people who have their own agendas? And are those agendas “financed” with capital that is creating by your athletic achievements?

These are the difficult questions and scenarios that must be handled by an experienced team of financial professionals that consistently educate a professional athlete on the opportunity costs of their decisions while also providing ample flexibility to use their capital and embrace financial freedom.

So how do you utilize capital to create more time, talent, and capital? Let’s start with turning capital into more capital. Most people refer to this process as investing. Actually, investing can be defined as “to commit money or capital in order to gain a financial return” (see www.freedictionary.com). The key word in this definition is commit. When you commit to something, you are accepting the risks associated with that decision. There is no certainty that your investment will produce a return or that your return will be in line with your expectations. This is why educated investors commit all their resources (time, talent, and capital) to an investment. Taking the time to perform due diligence on the appropriateness of an investment causes the investor to determine how much risk applies to the opportunity.

It doesn’t matter which type of asset you are considering investing in (i.e., securities like stocks or bonds, real estate, starting a business, or a financial product purchased from an institution); minimizing risk is a true talent a professional athlete needs to possess. Reducing risk helps investors to keep more of what they make. The more capital you can retain, the better off you will be in the long run. Many entrepreneurs say they have a passion for investing. Most people misinterpret this as a love for making money. Instead, what really happens is that entrepreneurs receive enjoyment from creating more control and freedom over their time and the potential to improve their talents through positive real-life experiences. Can’t this also be said for professional athletes?Isn’t playing “for the love of the game” not just a pure notion of sports but also a way of life for some of the most successful athletes?

Some would call this type of feeling “wisdom” or “a knack” for something. But when you can see a person’s true talent in action, it can be an epiphany. It’s a gift, and gifts are meant to be shared. Most people have a hard time understanding that their time, talent, or capital has subjective limitations. How much of these resources do you need and want so that you can enjoy your life? That question has gone unanswered for millions of Americans. They find themselves paralyzed by their limiting beliefs. They never achieve their potential because they are too worried about failure.

The best athletes in their sports embrace failure as part of their daily routine and realize that there is no such thing as failure – only feedback. With this feedback, they learn from their experiences and create opportunities to “rise to the occasion.” If this type of occasion presents itself in scenarios where the game is played against their team’s biggest rival or possibly post-season play, then that athlete can build a legacy for their entire playing career – and beyond.It is these types of memories that we all dream about being a part of as children. Getting to “live the dream” can produce more capital in an athlete’s lifetime then they could ever have imagined.

This is why it is so important to determine ways to protect an athlete’s resource of time, talent, and capital. Their potential is unknown but it is life-changing for sure!

While everyone has a finite amount of Time, Talent, and Capital, successful entrepreneurs understand the importance of delegating key functions to those with specialized experience rather than trying to do everything themselves. e3 Sports relies on an extensive Integrated Resource Network of trusted professionals to step in as needed to help in any area of your financial and entrepreneurial life. Think of us as a wise, experienced coach with an all-star team of professionals on our roster.

Whether your needs are tax, law, real estate, trust, insurance, or any number of other areas, we’ve got you covered.

After years of research and thousands of meetings with entrepreneurial minded people, e3 has developed a system that will help you identify the areas in your personal and business economy that need immediate attention and long term focus. e3 assists our clients in the creation of WIN-WIN-WIN scenarios.

WIN #1 – The Client Experience

Educating our clients what it is about e3’s business model that differentiates us from other financial firms.

Explain how e3 has developed systems to provide consistent results that manage our clients’ expectations over time.

Understanding who our ideal client is. What makes this person or company tick – their goals, aspirations, challenges, concerns, and most importantly, their mindset.

How we utilize a unique teamwork business model to balance the optimization of each client’s experience with the company’s profitability.

WIN #2- Our Staff’s Environment

The strength of any successful business is the collection of people behind it who interact with clients on a day to day basis. Our staff understand that e3 values their daily contribution through the implementation of various tools and resources that allow e3 to manage our clients’ expectations:

Processes and procedures that increase everyone’s efficiency and effectiveness

Improve our infrastructure through technological enhancements and a search for simplicity as they engage with clients

WIN #3 – Owning Your Entrepreneurial Experience

When an e3 client chooses to embark on a career that optimizes their unique talents, it is a decision that begins a journey from Worry to Wealth, and ultimately to Worthiness. At various points, our clients will experience struggles, challenges, opportunities, and success that requires assistance from experienced financial professionals. e3 recognizes the uniqueness of each client’s journey and e3 wants to advocate for them along the way.

Congratulations! Your dreams of a long and prosperous career have materialized. e3 believes you need to give yourself permission to enjoy the life you have created. However, there is still work to be done in the following areas:

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